Unless otherwise indicated herein, the materials described in this section are not prior art to the claims in this application and are not admitted to be prior art by inclusion in this section.
Communication between electronic devices may be established for many applications. Such communication may include, or begin with, pairing two electronic devices together as participants in a communications channel. For wired channels, pairing may be explicitly initiated by directly coupling the electronic devices together with an interconnect mechanism such as a cable. For wireless channels, pairing may either be automatically initiated or manually initiated. Automatic pairing of electronic devices through a wireless channel lacks positive visual confirmation to a user and thus may be insecure and susceptible to various known exploits such as a “man in the middle” attack. Manual pairing may be established by the manual entry of an address, name, key, or identification code. Manual entry is time consuming, error prone, and not particularly user friendly.
In an example pairing application, a user may walk up to a kiosk, automated teller machine (ATM), or other host system and wish to use a mobile telephone, personal digital assistant (PDA), or other portable electronic device to communicate with the host system. The user may wish to establish communications between the mobile device and the host device for identification, transactions, file transfers, or other purposes.